There is no shortage of advice about what business owners should do.
You should grow.
You should hire.
You should delegate.
You should raise your prices.
You should improve your margins.
You should reinvest in the business.
You should build a team.
You should get yourself out of the day-to-day.
You should scale.
And, apparently, at some point someone will probably tell you that you should become an S-Corp.
Maybe some of that advice is right.
But there’s a question that needs to come before all of it:
What are you actually trying to accomplish?
Because there isn’t one right business to build.
And a decision that makes perfect sense for one business owner can be completely wrong for another.
More isn’t always the answer
Suppose you own a service business and you need to make more money.
The obvious answer might seem to be:
Get more clients.
But what if you’re already working as much as you reasonably can?
Now what?
You could hire someone.
Maybe.
You could raise your prices.
Maybe.
You could change the type of work you take on, serve fewer clients, offer something different, reduce expenses, improve the margin on the work you already do, or change how the work gets delivered.
Maybe you really do need more clients.
We don’t know yet.
Because “I need to make more money” tells us there’s a problem.
It doesn’t tell us what the right solution is.
Before deciding what to change, I want to know something else.
How much more money do you need—and why?
That changes the conversation.
Your business has to work for you, too
Years ago, I worked with the owner of a professional practice that was consistently operating at a loss.
He wasn’t taking a salary.
He was working constantly.
And the financial pressure was following him home.
Eventually, during one of our conversations, he told me what he really needed.
He needed the business to provide about $10,000 a month for his family.
This was years ago, when $120,000 a year went considerably further than it does today.
And he was almost embarrassed to tell me the number. He worried it was excessive.
I didn’t.
Because the important question wasn’t whether someone else thought $10,000 a month was too much.
It was what his family needed the business to provide.
That number gave us something real to work with.
We could look at what the practice was producing, what it cost to operate, how money was moving through it, and what would have to change for the business eventually to support that level of owner income.
But we also looked at the other side.
Did the family really need $10,000 a month right now?
That led to conversations outside the walls of the business, too. His family made some temporary changes to their spending so the practice had room to become financially stronger without having to support their previous lifestyle immediately.
Neither side existed in isolation.
The business affected the life.
The life affected what the business needed to produce.
And once we understood both, we could make decisions intentionally instead of forcing the practice to conform to some generic idea of what a successful professional practice was supposed to look like.
What works for someone else may not work for you
Not every “should” comes from someone giving you advice.
Sometimes we create our own by looking around.
Someone else hired their first employee, so maybe you should too.
Another owner raised their prices.
Someone you follow online just crossed $1 million in revenue.
Another business seems to be growing faster than yours.
Comparison can be useful. It gives us reference points, exposes us to possibilities, and sometimes shows us something we hadn’t considered.
But don’t mistake someone else’s choice for your instruction.
You don’t necessarily know what that owner is trying to accomplish.
You don’t know what their business needs to provide for them personally. You don’t know their capacity, their margins, their cash position, their debt, or what they’re willing to sacrifice to get where they’re going.
And you probably don’t know what isn’t working behind the scenes.
Even if their decision was exactly right for them, they may not be trying to build the same business—or the same life—you are.
So the useful question isn’t:
Should I be doing what they’re doing?
It’s:
Is there something here that makes sense for what I’m trying to accomplish?
Maybe there is.
Maybe there isn’t.
Two businesses can look very similar from the outside and need completely different things from the inside.
One owner may want to build a team and keep growing.
Another may want to stay small, make a very good living, and have control over their time.
Neither is doing it wrong.
They’re building different businesses because they want different things from them.
Capacity changes the question
This becomes especially important in smaller service businesses because the owner’s capacity is often one of the business’s biggest constraints.
There are only so many hours you can work.
Only so many clients you can serve.
Only so many projects you can personally deliver.
So if you’re already near capacity and want to make more money, simply adding more sales may be the worst possible answer.
Revenue might increase.
And your life might become considerably worse.
Instead, we might need to look at pricing.
Or client mix.
Or service mix.
Or margin.
Or whether some of the work you’re doing should be done by someone else.
Or whether you’re spending your limited capacity on work that actually produces enough value for the business.
Those are financial questions.
But they’re also questions about what you’re trying to build.
The numbers don’t choose the destination
This is one of the reasons I don’t believe financial information should be used to tell business owners what they should want.
The numbers are incredibly useful.
They can tell us what has happened.
They can help us understand what the business can currently support.
They can reveal constraints.
They can help us model choices and understand tradeoffs.
They can show us whether the decision we made six months ago is producing the result we expected.
But they don’t get to choose the destination.
You do.
Once we know what you’re trying to accomplish, the numbers become a way to understand what that choice requires.
Want to stay small?
Great. What does the business need to produce for that model to support you?
Want to hire?
Okay. What will that hire cost, what capacity will it create, and what needs to happen for the investment to make sense?
Want to work less?
Good. What needs to change in pricing, mix, margin, capacity, or expenses for the business to continue supporting you with fewer hours?
Want to grow aggressively for the next three years?
Fine. What will that require from cash, people, infrastructure—and you?
None of those goals is inherently better than another.
They’re simply different destinations.
And different destinations require different routes.
Success should fit
Eventually, the practice became financially stronger.
But one of the things I remember most wasn’t a financial metric.
The owner wrote to me before leaving for his family’s annual vacation.
For the first time, he was looking forward to it because he was finally free enough from the practice that he didn’t have to work while he was there.
That mattered.
The business hadn’t merely improved according to some financial measure.
It was beginning to work better for the person who owned it.
And perhaps that’s a better place to start when you’re deciding what your business should do next.
Not:
What am I supposed to do?
But:
What am I actually trying to accomplish?
Then we can look at the numbers.
Then we can look at the options.
Then we can understand the tradeoffs.
And then you can make a decision that fits the business you’re actually trying to build—and the life you’re asking it to support.